Punctuation

So earlier today I took a break from catching up on my e-mail. There were sounds of intense tickling happening in Sarah’s bedroom, and Oot was doing one of his best laughs: sort of this helpless throaty chortle that means you’ve *really* got him going.

I don’t know if Sarah realizes, but he gets that laugh from her. When something happens that strikes Sarah as really funny, she does this deep, throaty laugh. It’s like the sound a donkey would make if it was suddenly turned into an cartoon stereotype of an overweight geek. It goes heah heah heah.

It is in no way a dignified sound. But it is my favorite laugh ever. It’s full of genuine amusement. And whatever it lacks in dignity it makes up in honesty. True laughter is rarely dignified.

Anyway, Oot is doing his version of this laugh, which means she’s probably managed to get his ribs. She’s good at the ribs, I’m a leg man myself.

(Dramatic Recreation)

I would like to digress slightly to say that I’m a master-class fucking tickler. Seriously. I’m amazing. I could teach a class on tickling. I could do a TED talk.

Anyway, I come in to Sarah’s bedroom and lay down on the bed all casual-like, ready to produce some bespoke tickling.

Then Sarah looks at me with lust in her eyes and says, “You smell so good. It’s making me stupid.”

To understand her statement, you have to realize that I am the next stage in human evolution. My pheromonic musk is developed to the point where it’s practically a weapon. In the best of circumstances, I smell masculine. And on a day when I’m staying home and have skipped my morning shower…

Well…. suffice to say that you know there’s a man in the house, even if you can’t see me.

On top of that, I’d been writing. I don’t know why, but when I’m writing, my man-smell gets particularly strong. It’s like my body is trying to establish its dominance over reality itself.

The effects of this pheromonal cocktail vary, but with a select section of the female populous it has two profound, complimentary effects.

1. It delivers a message directly to the woman’s hindbrain, saying: THERE IS A MAN NEARBY, AND YOU MUST MATE WITH HIM.

2. It immediately drops the woman’s intelligence anywhere from 10-50 IQ points, which makes it hard for them to realize that mating with me is *obviously* a bad idea, while at the same time rendering them more vulnerable to my not inconsiderable charm.

You have to admit that evolutionarily speaking, this is a winning combo.

Anyway, Sarah says that, and we laugh. Then, after giving Oot a good tickling, I ask her if I can post her comment up on facebook.

She agrees, and I go to amuse the internets.

But here’s the problem. I can’t find a way to accurately portray what she said.

It should be easy. I know exactly *what* she said. Eight words. Two independent clauses.

But it’s not easy. The trouble lies in the punctuation.

Let’s start with the most generic way of doing this.

“You smell so good. It’s making me stupid.”

Punctuated like this, her statement feels choppy and wooden. More importantly, the statement feels matter-of-fact and emotionless.

But if you try to spice it up with an exclamation mark….

“You smell so good! It’s making me stupid.”

There’s a reason exclamation abuse is a crime. Punctuated this way, Sarah seems hopelessly manic. Like she was hopping up and down, excited. That’s not right at all.

You can’t do it the other way, either….

“You smell so good. It’s making me stupid!”

Then it seems like she’s excited that she’s stupid, which gives the wrong impression on every conceivable level.

And neither of those options address the other problem, that having a full stop in the middle makes it feel like she’s making two separate, unconnected statements. That’s simply not the case, she’s making one complex statement.

Here’s how I’d like to punctuate it…

“You smell so good, it’s making me stupid.”

But that’s a comma splice. I’m not opposed to them entirely, I’m no slave to grammar. But when you’re relaying one line of dialogue and it’s grammatically incorrect…. That’s just not classy. It’s sloppy writing.

Technically, you could fix this with a semicolon….

“You smell so good; it’s making me stupid.”

In some ways this is the right thing to do. A semicolon is the official way to show two independent clauses have a close relationship to each other.

Here’s the problem: Semicolons are for wankers. Seriously. You can go your whole life without ever needing to really use a semicolon.

Unless you’re an academic, of course. If you’re an academic, you’ve got to use semicolon to impress other wankers with how much of a wanker you are so you can get your paper published. You know, that paper you wrote detailing your in-depth Marxist interpretation of the last eight lines of John Donne’s “The Flea?” The paper where you used the word “moreover” twenty-seven times in eleven pages?

Most importantly, a semicolon looks really strange in a piece of casual dialogue. People don’t speak using semicolons. Unless they’re wankers.

A lot of time, I’ll default to an ellipsis. Because I love ellipses.

“You smell so good… it’s making me stupid.”

But it implies too much of a pause in the middle of the statement.

What about an em dash?

“You smell so good— it’s making me stupid.”

Nope. Just looks weird.

And don’t even think about using an en dash, you little fuckers. That’s *not* what an en dash is for….

In the end, the only way to make this piece of dialogue “sound” right to the reader is through use of interstitials.

“You smell so good,” she said, looking at me with half-lidded eyes. “It’s making me stupid.”

That’s not quite right either. We need some foregrounding *and* an interstitial….

There. That’s just about right. That conveys her tone and mood in the appropriate way.

What’s my point?

Well, first off, let me say that I never promised there would be a point here. Sometimes I just idly muse about shit. Sometimes I just tell stories. Sometimes there’s no point.

But if there *is* a point it’s probably this: When you’re writing, there are no small choices. Or perhaps it would be better to say that writing is nothing *but* small choices. And all of them have the opportunity to effect your story in a disproportionately large way. Punctuation can change the tone of a sentence. The tone of a sentence can change the feel of a scene. And the feel of a scene can change your impression of a character’s personality.

A secondary point is that this is why my revision takes so long. When you think all these little things to death, you tend to fidget with a text a *lot.*

“Socrates does defer an inspection of Charmides’ beauty until after they have examined his soul; this treats the state of Charmides’ body as secondary and perhaps subordinate.”

“In this speech, Socrates claims to have an herb for Charmides’ head and a charm for Charmides’ soul; the first ensures the good condition of the body (it will cure his headache), the second the good condition of the soul (it will produce σωφροσύνη).”

There were some worse ones, by far, of course. But I don’t want to get into whether or not semicolons have value; rather, I’d like to lodge a point that’s to the side. [<< Couldn't resist that one.]

Whatever the value of semicolons, I do think part of their bad rap is that they're extra awful taken out of context. In the middle of a pretty convoluted (academic) passage, I often find them handy. Now that may well be because I'm an awkward writer, no master stylist here. And it may be that the academic game relies on quantity, not polished quality. But if semicolons do have a non-wankerish value (however minor), then it can’t help their cause that they look so silly pulled out as a one-liner.

I don’t get all this anti-semicolonic sentiment. The way I see it, the semicolon represents a shorter pause than the period; it connects thoughts as well as separating them. It is a useful tool in writing, allowing more control over the rhythm of your prose.

Would you compose a symphony without quarter rests, on the principle that a full stop does the job just as well?

Besides, it provides sentence variety in what could otherwise be a boring paragraph. It may be a difficult bit of punctuation to master, but it’s totally useful; when one is painting a picture with words, it’s nice to have all the brushes to accurately paint the image.

When I used to teach history to students of a notorious university that shall remain nameless, I would allow them only three semicolons and three em dashes for the entire semester. Suffice it to say that this was a surprisingly challenging limit to stay under for the average undergrad with presumptions of writing quality. That said, given that I am a graduate student with presumptions of writing quality (emphasis on the presumptions — they’re not validly held), I can definitely count myself amongst the repeat offender list.

I love semicolons; I’ve used them frequently ever since I discovered that there was something that was actually correct to put in my writing wherever I wanted to do a comma splice. I’ve been marked down for comma splices a lot in my life, and it is extraordinarily irritating; it shames me to be seen as bad at anything grammar-related.

MEANWHILE …

I am okay with different people having different tastes. And different smells. It is indeed sexy.

Pat,
That was freaking awesome. From the picture of Oot to the subtle W;t reference, I’ve never read such a clear and entertaining explanation on the importance of punctuation. Just a couple of thoughts:
It took me years to work up the courage to use a semi-colon. Seriously, it was like I had gone through some academic right of passage when I finally felt comfortable using one or two per paper. I totally use “moreover,” too, but only in moderation.
I’m also reminded of another entertaining (yet brief) discussion of punctuation. An episode of MTV’s surprisingly excellent “Awkward.” once explained that “ellipses are the whores of punctuation” while discussing how punctuation affected the subject of a text message.

I love ellipses; I also love semicolons. Does that make me a semi-wanker? Can one be any sort of wanker if one is a female-type person? The internets entirely fail to address this important question. Why is there no masturbation-themed pejorative for women? Discuss.

I like the word elipsis… sorry too much coffee. As for the word wank or wanker I believe it could be used to describe female masturbation, it is a vulgar term but it could suffice given the right context.

This is what you do. You make us feel like it was so obvious before. It HAD to be there in a very obvious way. I read this post. And I knew that you were describing the phrase’s evolution. When I got to the end, I would see the genius. I KNEW the feeling from the first sentence. But you had deconstructed it and were rebuilding it piece by piece for my entertainment. And I could see the growth of it all. But after all the examples…the end of the post came. And I compared it to the original. And there it was. Exactly the same. No evolution. I hate you.

I’d go for the comma splice since the “Because you smell so good” is implied. And hey, it’s dialogue, spoken by an obviously pheromone-drugged woman. She doesn’t care about punctuation, just procreation.

But yeah, I’ll resort to fudging things with an em dash long before I resort to a semi-colon.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Finally, an answer to the question of how to punctuate “yo momma so fat” jokes.

I thought the whole debate was going to be period vs. comma vs. nothing. All the other options are obviously wrong to me, except the interstitials (which didn’t occur to me).

Of course, now that I wrote it out and looked at it, nothing (“You smell so good it’s making me stupid”) doesn’t look right either. I think the comma is closest to correct. The grammatically correct version would actually be “You smell so good that it’s making me stupid”. But that’s not what she said, and probably too formal for the context.

Or actually, the period might be best, depending on the intent. If she first decided to say “You smell so good”, as a complete statement, and then (probably after a bit of a pause) decided to say what it was doing to her, then the period evokes that pretty well.

I’m in the middle of trying to write a short story for WotF, and due to how much time I’ve spent fiddling around with punctuation, this discussion has left me feeling like I’ve shown up to class without any pants on. :-)

Ecstatic that I could return the favor of sharing a laugh. I am, however, still going to comb the ever-loving hell out of my story for subtle grammatical failures again (and again… and again… and again…).

Just as an aside, I recently read through both NotW and WMF again, and as always, your sheer prowess at writing landed a solid punch to the gut of my self-confidence.

So I decided I should go read The Road to Levenshir again (as your amazing success story is what prompted me to try my hand at WotF to begin with), and hope that the Great and Powerful Pat was once a mere mortal like I.

The very first page, what stands out to me… “Men and women lounged about talking. One strummed a lute; another tapped a tabor idly against his leg.”

Stunned, I rip out my copy of WMF and flip to the appropriate section… “One strummed a lute, while another tapped a small tabor idly against his leg.”

I know you hate revising over and over again, but I can’t tell you how motivating (and… relieving) it is to see an example of how it evolved for you. Thanks. :-)

Meh. I could give a fuck about the Affect/effect thing. I always get it wrong. It won’t stay in my head, and the amount of time it takes for me to look it up and figure it out just isn’t worth it to me.

Thanks Pat for completing my awesome week.
I finished the tests for this semester, i got my worldbuilders package with some nice stuff, i spent time with my girlfriend… (or “;” or “-” or “.” ??? )
and now you gave me a nice literature/writing lecture, while i enjoyed learning more about my favourite author.

Amusingly, all but the third of those three semicolons would actually have been better off as colons: they are explaining or elucidating something, rather than being independent clauses on a common theme.

Some posters have already suggested or deflated a version with no internal punctuation at all, but I would argue that “You smell so good it’s making me stupid.” is the perfect version of the line, since it does two key things at once:

1- It conveys the sudden rush of thoughts as they jumble from Sarah’s brain to her mouth, evoked by the power of surging Rothemones.

2 – The technically incorrect grammar (lacking the “that” which would render the sentence sound) captures both the feel of casual, real dialogue (I’m a drama guy, so I spend my time thinking about how to write dialogue so that actors know how to make it sound real) and the loss of grammatical eloquence that Sarah clearly must be experiencing in that moment.

Oh my, I am an ellipsis addict as well! I am in a fiction writing workshop course in college right now and we have to critique each others’ work. I have one classmate who offered to send me a Word doc with all of his “suggested corrections.” I declined, of course . However, he made it clear that he was disgusted with my use of ellipses. My professor didn’t care for it either, but said perhaps it is a matter of style. Damn right it’s style! But can anyone tell me how else I would write this and capture the way this woman would have sounded?

“Breech,” she gasped. “Not…going…to…make it.”

Should I say:

“Breech. Not going to make it,” she said, each word coming between labored gasps.

I can’t tell you how much I loved this post. From the obvious love for Sarah and Oot to the genuine puzzlement of how to punctuate a statement that would further demonstrate the love. And it was educational too! This is why I enjoy reading your musings, point or no. Thank you Pat.

I do this in my head all the time…even though I’m usually not planning to write anything down. I just like thinking about how things would look written out, and the best way to get the proper emphasis across.

What about no punctuation? “You smell so good it’s making me stupid.” It’s still grammatically incorrect, but the way I’m hearing it, there’s a “that” which is missing but still implied. If it’s one sentence, write it that way.

This. This, right fucking here, is why I enjoy your writing so much. When I read your books, it is those million little details of perfection honed to a razors edge that only my sub-conscience notices that make it so enjoyable. This is why you will never hear me bitch about your time table or your writing process (besides, the key word there is “your”), every sentence is well worth the wait.

Tyson: Depending on how tightly retentive your grammatical sphincter is, that might be considered acceptable. If you’re wibbeldy-wobbly with prescriptivism (as I am :-P ), you could claim that your version of the sentence contains an implied relative pronoun:

“You smell so good [that] it’s making me stupid.”

People talk like this all the time (e.g.: “I love her so much I could kiss her!” or “That movie was so good I went home immediately and wrote three hundred pages of trite, self-flattering fanfiction!”). While I wouldn’t often write narration like this, I’m cool with it showing up in dialog.

Yes, this. When you leave out the “who” or “that” you’re said by linguists to be using a “zero relative.” It’s acceptable in English. Even Shakespeare uses them. It’s also acceptable to use a comma elliptically, to indicate a word or phrase was left out. We do this all the time in other contexts, and the practice of using commas in such a manner is similarly dusty. Here’s Francis Bacon: “Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.” For this reason, I’d go with the comma between the clauses. There’s a difference between using a comma elliptically and using it because you don’t know the sentence has ended.

Pat, I love this, especially this “Semicolons are for wankers. Seriously. You can go your whole life without ever needing to really use a semicolon.” I used to be the features editor at the Pointer back in the day. I was Kate (sometimes Katey) Roberts back then — now Kate Edenborg. Now I teach at UW-Stout (yikes an academic : ) and teach writing and have been telling my students to avoid using semicolons. So very glad to have some support on that one (and it’s hard to come by as a journalist who works in an English department). So glad to see you’ve been doing so well!

Agreed. Students are far too happy to hit the semicolon key. I tell them that 95% of the time I see one in a student paper, it’s been used incorrectly to create a fragment sentence. Result? No change at all: Everyone thinks he or she is in that other 5%. :-)

Thank you so much for this post! I’ve been a loyal reader for a while now, but I’ve never left a comment. I’m in the middle of writing an academic paper that is due tomorrow (in which I have used several semicolons and the word “moreover” at least once), and when I saw you had a new blog post up I knew it would cheer me up. Well, I nearly spit out my drink. You are hilarious, this post is hilarious, and you have made me feel much better. There is nothing like laughing at yourself.

as always i love what you’ve written, and how you’ve written it. i hope seeing bad grammar and near total lack of punctuation doesn’t drive you too crazy. ill just use auto correct. i have great thoughts, and great taste but lack education and ability to even begin to write the things i think with anything even approaching the beauty and alacrity with which you weave your words.
Yours,
With awe,
Pet

Ironicaly as I was reading this blog I was thinking, “This is a prime example of the detail Pat puts into his revisions.” So isn’t it nice that is actually the point you were going for. Keep revising, keep tickling, and moreover (couldn’t resist) enjoy life.

For informal communication, I agree, but for printing/publishing you can actually do better: “flush dots, or thin-spaced dots (up to one-fifth of an em), or the prefabricated ellipsis character (Unicode U+2026, Latin entity …).”

I am utterly amused. I get crap all the time for my love of comma splices to convey dialogue. I’m glad to see there is at least one other creature on this planet that understands that sometimes that really is the most elegant way.

I laughed in a very undignified manner throughout the entirety of this; I am not ashamed. :P You, Pat, are amazing. I love you. And your writing. And your awesomeness. And your hatred for the word “moreover”. I’ll forgive your hatred of semicolons….

This could be my most favorite post of yours ever. Taking something from your deep personal life and creating a wicked awesome grammar lesson out of it. While plying the grammar lesson to us to reveal tons of cool stuff about yourself. Beyond your books posts like this have made you my all time favorite author.
Thank you

I laughed when I read this… seriously laughed. See? I like ellipses also. I also tend to overuse commas. However, I do use the occasional semi-colon. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t seem to help myself sometimes.

Hmmm… so where do you stand on using words other than “said” to convey meaning in dialogue? Is it really just the author sticking his or her nose where it doesn’t belong?

I could see “growled” adding something, unless she’s actively inhaling your fragrance, in which case I might be tempted to use “breathed.” “Purred” could probably suffice in a pinch; I could really see it striking the proper balance between OMG I’M A WANKER.

I love that you referred to us as “little fuckers” for your assumption that we’d so misuse the en dash. Mind, I’m a professional student, so I barely know what language I’m typing in, let alone different dash protocols.

Seriously though. Amazing blog post. I love random musing on tidbits of story telling like this.

This is why I try not to take prescriptive grammar rules too seriously. Sometimes it’s just hard to get it right if you always draw within the lines.

I mean, holy hell, in the intro to Star Trek: SNG, Picard uses a split infinitive: “to boldly go.” And you know what? It sounds better than “to go boldly.”

Of course, punctuation is even trickier because there’s no sound and no word there — it’s just a mark. But personally, I tend to do what I’ve just done — use a dash. It’s probably the most versatile punctuation mark we have in English, and personally I wouldn’t mind seeing it used more. Done correctly it really shines. All you need to do is read Emily Dickinson to see that. Take Ben Yagoda’s example of one of Dickinson’s original poems versus how it was mangled in some published versions:

Initially thought this was going to be the most literate letter to pent house ever. Not sure whether or not i’m happier with a post about correctly using grammar to convey emotion and nuance. well played

Loved this post. Pat you are…well….amazing. But, there are two things in your post that I have not seen mentioned in any of the other responses. First, I would like to see more fan speculation on “More cool stuff this week. Stay tuned”. I am suspicious that the entire first portion of the blog is a literary form of magician chatter to distract the eyes (focus) off the hands.
second-Harold and the purple crayon…?

Maybe someone has said this already, but you don’t need any punctuation at all. What Sarah actually said was “You smell so good that it’s making me stupid.” In spoken English we often leave out the that (which is, in this case, acting as a subordinating conjunction to show a result.)

You know what I noticed while reading the sentence with COLOR helped me understand just as well as if you described it out. This is making wonder did you choose to use that color for any particular reason?

I guess I had a wanker for a teacher at some point in early middle school. :) She was very big on the semicolon and actively promoted it’s use. Somewhere along the line, I started replacing all of my semicolons with em dashes — it just felt right — and I remember making the conscious choice and never looking back. I probably noticed that none of the novels I was reading really used semicolons, but I never really understood what I didn’t like about them. Can anyone describe what’s wrong with the semicolon?

Thank you for the very erudite lesson on the beauty of rhythm and timing in prose. Brilliantly delivered.

I admit that I listened to the audiobook version of your book three times in a row. The Rupert Degas version, of course. Good lord! Your prose and his voice together… sheer ear-porn.

That being said, there was a line in there worthy of a second-edition re-write: at one point (and I paraphrase) a character – Denna? – gets to her feet and pulls Kvothe to his feet in the same sentence. IMHO, it would have flowed more elegantly to say, “she got to her feet and pulled me to mine”.

Pat,
Sometimes I think I can write okay. Then I read a blog like this and I realize that I am at best an amateur, and at worst a hack. Thank you for sharing these gems. I swear they’re more useful than a four year degree.

I just happen to be taking a break from writing my paper on sociological perspectives on cyberbullying. Take a wild guess at which perspective I just happen to have next…you ass. But yeah, I am a wanker until they give me that piece of paper that says I know crap.

Dear Mr. Rothfuss,
I (and thousands of others) use semi colons every day and I am not a “wanker”. Really, I’m not.
There is a profession that you and many others seem to have forgotten; that is, the profession of stenography or court reporting. They use the semi colon every day because they are turning the spoken word into the written word, so their rules for punctuation differ greatly from that of traditional writing. At last count, they have 11 rules or guidelines for the semi colon, 10 for the dash, 9 for the colon, 10 for the question mark, 6 for the period, and a whopping 42 guidelines for the comma. These rules can change depending on where you’re working and current trends in transcription. Their objective is to create a clear and understandable verbatim transcript of the proceedings, and in order to do that, they are not bound by the same shackles as a professional writer. Most people do not speak in perfect grammatical English, and if you’ve ever read a verbatim transcript of any court proceeding, you’d be more forgiving of the semi colon.
As one of my instructors put it, punctuation can save lives.

“Let’s eat, Grandma.” vs. “Let’s eat Grandma.”

Not that I’m taking your blog post all that seriously, it’s just that my first response was “Hey! I use semi colons all the time, and I’m not a wanker!” (By the way, we are never supposed to use exclamation points because we are supposed to remain neutral and not make judgments about the emotional state of the speaker.)
I do enjoy your blog post, and find you to be terribly witty.

Pat, I think I have a serious problem. I read that of coolness this week, and I cannot but seeing your blog like 20 per day times to see if there is a new. Pat I damn you for being so good. But, seriously, I don’t know waht do you think of yourself, but let me say that you are probably the writer with the most beautiful style of writing. And I love Bast and Denna.

While you may dislike the semicolon… I have to say that without it I probably wouldn’t have made it through University (I graduate this May!). Frankly I am not good at writing. Heck, I flat out suck at writing! It’s probably why I enjoying reading so much.

This has to be one of my favourite posts of yours. It’s funny, it’s intellectually witty, & it’s educational &… poignant? Anyway, you made me smile, you made me laugh, & you made me think. :D Thank you for taking the time to fidget out every last use of punctuation!

I guess I’m a wanker then. I love the semi-colon. It’s a grammar nerd thing, maybe. Really, there are certain constructions that just scream out for semi-colons. Mountain climbing and bicycling and other sports all have their cool specialized gear. Semi-colons are the specialized gear of language – with the same justification as the sporting gear. It exists, and therefore should be used where and when appropriate. I say, if the semi-colon be the freak flag of language geeks, long may it fly!

As a woman of child bearing age, I didn’t even need the punctuation. I know exactly how she said it. Which bears some speculation on the different ways men and women read your books, or books in general.

It occurs to me that in this case the comma is actually completely valid. The full grammatical form is ‘so X that Y’, with Y being some consequence of the extreme nature of X (‘so tall that I can’t reach it’, ‘so fierce that none dare approach it’, &c.), and, as we all know, ‘that’ is often omitted in favour of the humble comma. I would even go so far as to say that, at least pedantically, ‘you smell so good’ is not a full independent clause worthy of standing proud next to a semicolon: the second part of the ‘so … that …’ construction has been most cruelly elided.

The semicolon is a cruelly misinterpreted beast. He only wants to help authors avoid extraneous coördinating conjunctions. ☹

I hope that comment about en dashes wasn’t aimed at a very common typographical style in the UK where a spaced en dash – or the en rule, as it is known here – is used for asides and so forth. (As I’ve just demonstrated.)

I much prefer it to an em rule, especially as it is visually distinctive from a proper interrup—
—tion, which now has more impact on the page from not being overused on piffling asides.

Incidentally, the spaced en rule has layout advantages in ebooks at the moment due to the inconstant and crappy way different devices handle line breaks for em rules. Em rules cause some fugly layout. Spaced en dash justifies nicely on a line, and with proper use of non-breaking spaces, will break on the right hand side but not on the left. I wish more publishers would pay more heed to good typography for ebooks. And don’t get me started on non breaking spaces and ellipses!

What’s the point in it? WHAT’S THE POINT IN IT?!?! It was more or less the first point since the time I was tought how to write that I can absorb as a whole without question marks, without little, annoyingly unimportant information pieces that I must to find and that I never did turn my attention onto. It was one of the best thing someone could ever tought me about writing (expect teaching me how to tell a story that actually develop as time pass, and not one that you feel like you stuck in time yet continue with the story line, but that one problem is probably a problem I could only end by wiping away all of my adjectives and the “momentary motions” as I usually call them, than writing the story, but oh well)